BR.IEFLY NOTED
The Hunger Angel, by Herta Müller,
translated from the German by Philip
Boehm (Metropolitan). Written in terse,
hypnotic prose, this moving novel by a re-
cent Noble laureate is set in a Russian
Gulag at the end of the Second World
War. The narrator, Leo Auberg, a member
ofRomaniàs German-speaking minority,
arrives at the age of seventeen and remains
for five years. Surviving on bread and cab-
bage soup, the internees are maddened by
starvation; in Leo's mind, they are con-
trolled by a "hunger angel," who drives
them to steal food from one another and
clothes from still warm corpses. Leo, who
is further alienated by his nascent homo-
sexuality, takes comfort in the objects and
materials that surround him-the shape
of his shovel, the texture of wet cement-
and his lengthy depictions, as exquisite as
they are bleak, make up much of the
novel. "I wanted to work out a trade with
things that aren't alive but aren't dead ei-
ther," he says.
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, by
Aimee Phan (St. Martin's). Propelled by
the need to understand her splintering,
sprawling Vietnamese family, the epony-
mous protagonist of this début novel
stitches together a multigenerational
account drawn from the clandestine cor-
respondence among her parents and
grandparents. The journey of the T ruongs
from war-torn Vietnam to the West is
beset by betrayals and sacri-
fices that threaten to undo
the family long after they
have escaped. Although the
story belongs primarily to
Cherry, various familymem-
bers take turns unspooling
the narrative, contributing
their own tales of unhappy
love and unfulfilled ambition. Vlti-
mately, the stories flow a litde too readily
into one another, as the novel presses
home its thesis: "Everyone has choices
taken away from them. Despair is pushed
into our lives. We can only control howwe
"
recover.
The Spanish Holocaust, by Paul Pres-
ton (Norton). Barely a month into the
military coup that sparked the Spanish
Civil War, in 1936, the caretaker of a
Granada cemetery was driven mad by
the executions being carried out there.
His replacement soon had to move
away from the site, "because the shots
and the cries and screams of the dying
had made it unbearable." Unflinch-
ingly, Preston sifts through the pillage,
torture, and mass executions of this
bleak chapter in Spanish history. The
prose generally moves briskly, though
the welter of material sometimes over-
whelms. Buried but discernible under
the documentary heap is Preston's per-
suasive distinction between right-wing
and left-wing violence; the former was
systematic and premeditated, its per-
petrators bent on annihilation and
"education through terror," while the
latter was disordered, random, and de-
centralized. He also touches on the
fascinating concept of "sociological
F rancoism" -the legacy of these events
in the enduring polarization of Span-
ish life.
Lives of the Novelists, by John Suther-
land (Vale). Billed as "A history of
fiction in 294 lives," this chatty, com-
panionable, undogmatic tome of cap-
sule biographies is arranged chronolog-
ically, from John Bunyan (1628-88) to
Rana Dasgupta (1971-). Like David
Thomson's "Biographical Diction-
ary of Film," this prose
brick is designed to be
skimmed, dipped into,
passed around, and argued
over. Sutherland is al-
most comically erudite.
Not only is he aware of
Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. (1823-
1887); he even seems to
have read his books (which apparently
"helped lay the foundations of mass
readership for American fiction") and
to have measured opinions of them.
There is a certain amount of bio-
graphical boilerplate, but sustained
browsing leaves one with the happy
feeling that there are no human activi-
ties more worthwhile than writing and
reading novels.
The new
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I Fun Home
Alison
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work of the most humane
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to the heart of things: why we are who
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- JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
"Many of us are living out the unlived
lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has
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Wherever books
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HMH www.hmhbooks.com
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 14, 2012
121